As the World Wide Web evolves into an increasingly dynamic channel for marketing and commerce, web sites are becoming mission-critical components of overall business strategies. Sophisticated businesses no longer view the web as a venue of relatively anonymous transactions, but as a crucial point of contact between the business and its customers—a place where lasting customer relationships can be forged and maintained. Businesses realize that, at each point of customer contact, significant amounts of data are being gathered and stored. The data from these disparate systems needs to be sorted, merged and coalesced into meaningful business information.
Companies for whom the Internet is a primary, if not the primary, conduit for managing customer relationships have invested heavily in their online businesses. To measure the return on this investment, and make the most of the web-marketing channel, managers need an E-Business Data Warehouse solution that can provide answers to the following types of questions:                Who are our best prospects and why?        Where are our most profitable customers coming from . . . which of our partner refers them to our site?        Which of our banner ad campaigns is driving the most qualified traffic to our site?        Which banner ad is generating the most revenue?        Which banner ad has the best buy versus browse ratio?        Which products are selling best online and why?        How many new or repeat visitors come to our site in a given time period?        What is the percentage and total number of new customers, existing customers, browsers for a given time period?        What is the conversion ratio for all customers coming to the site, by referral, by customer segment?        What is the average number of browse sessions prior to first purchase, second purchase, . . . nth purchase, by customer segment over a given time frame?        
Whereas the success of a company's web site was once measured in hits and page views, with the web master as primary audience for reports based on those metrics, the performance and information obtained from the web site is now critical to many members of the organization. To answer questions like the samples above, an E-Business Data Warehouse solution must be able to correlate click stream data with data from other disparate sources and transform it into actionable information available to users throughout the Enterprise.
While understanding online customers is necessary for an E-Business company's success, and extracting business information from web site traffic is imperative, web site complexity is growing exponentially. Today's complex web sites often employ geographically distributed servers and a mix of solutions, e.g., Ad Servers, Application Servers, Profile Servers, Content Management Systems and various Personalization technologies, to offer visitors a richer, more dynamic personal experience in the hope of turning those visitors into loyal customers. In addition, more and more companies are moving traditional business applications to the web and linking back-office systems to their online environments. These complex information architectures linking intranets, extranets and the Internet create vast amounts of raw data. The resulting site complexity, disparate data sources, and data volumes makes accurate and complete customer analysis difficult to impossible for most vendor solutions.
NCR Corporation has developed an E-Business Data Warehouse solution to provide the answers, embedded in this complex E-Business environment, to questions about online customers. NCR Corporation's E-Business Data warehouse solution, referred to herein as the Teradata Solutions for E-Business (TSEB), provides the decision support engine and surrounding technology to turn disparate customer information into knowledge. The ability to easily handle large amounts of data coupled with the ability to integrate data from many sources allows NCR. Corporation to provide the most robust and scalable complete E-Business Data Warehouse Solution available in the industry.